Archive for the 'cloud' Category

I’ve been watching and reading on developments around serverless computing. I’ve never used it myself so only have limited understanding. However, given my extensive knowledge of servers, firmware, OS, Middleware and business applications, I’ve had a bunch of questions.

For traditional enterprise type customers, it’s well worth reviewing the notes of the issues highlighted by Jason Katzer, Director of Software Engineering at Capital One. While some attendees talk about “upwards of a BILLION transactions per month” using serverlesss, that’s impressive, that’s still short of many enterprise requirements, it translates to 34.5-million transactions per day.

Katzer notes that there are always bottlenecks and often services that don’t scale the same way that your serverless apps do. Worth a read, thanks for posting Jeremy.

We’ve launched our new Dell Cloud Marketplace Beta. It is a joint development by the Dell Software Group and Dell Commerce Services and features a number of new innovations.

I’m really not qualified to discuss DCM, I’ve not been part of the team overseeing it, but here is a good blog/forum by a number of the team members with some additional useful information and a place to ask questions.

I watched along with some of the sessions via Live video link, which worked pretty well. Some of the announcements I knew about, updates to Active System Manager, the new Dell PowerEdge VRTX (vertex) solution for home office, remote office. This summary was provided in an internal email of the weeks activities and announcements, but contains all external links, Enjoy!

Enstratius complements the capability Dell recently acquired from Gale Technologies, now Active System Manager (ASM), by providing enhanced multi-cloud management and application configuration capabilities and integrates converged offerings with cloud systems management. Additionally, Enstratius has been in partnership with Dell since April 2012 in Dell’s Emerging Solutions Ecosystem Partner Program, and is offered as a component of the Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution.

Enstratius’ solutions are “cloud agnostic” so our customers can choose any combination of public and private cloud providers, including Dell and non-Dell clouds. The Enstratius technology can be deployed on-premises or consumed as a subscription service that enables full control from within a customer’s data center—giving our customers the flexibility to use the delivery method that best fits their business needs.

Today was a major day for Dell Software group. Out in San Francisco many of our team and some great customers, were talking about real Dell Software products. Why was this major?

Because it wasn’t about strategy, it wasn’t about an acquisition, it was about real problems and Dell Software products that customers are using to address those problems. There were some great customer speakers, as well as keynotes and breakout panels. The whole thing was streamed live via livestream, recordings are already up and available.

Big up also to the marketing team, I must admit Dell puts together some great infographics and this one was one of the best.

[Update: A couple of emails came in. Here is a useful written summary page with links in a Press Release.]

The Quest Software R&D integration is moving apace, 25-days into the acquisition and since announcement I’ve now managed to visit 14 R&D locations. I’ve been impressed by the people, many of the existing products, especially their bold move to support customers by getting a set of Office365 and Azure cloud based solutions out early to help customers migrate.

One of the more exciting products and announcements coming from the Quest(now part of Dell) team are the recent cloud data, business intelligence announcements.

CNBC has a good summary of the expansion of our big data solutions, new Hadoop-centric software capabilities for business analytics, which include application development, data replication, and data analysis features.

For me, just five more R&D location visits to go, Berlin, Dresden, Israel, then Poole and Horton in the UK. Then I can maybe catch-up on a huge backlog of blogposts I want to write, in the meantime , go bigdata!

This week Dell announced 3x major acquisitions, Wyse, Clerity Solutions, and Make Technologies. These acquisitions, once complete, will offer an awesome combination to move apps and customers to the cloud.

Wyse provides application virtualization capability which in essence will allow PC based applications to run as terminals in the cloud, accessing them via thin clients, increasingly mobile devices like tablets.

Clerity delivers application modernization and re-hosting solutions and services. Clerity’s capabilities will enable Dell Services to help customers reduce the cost of transitioning business-critical applications and data from legacy computing systems and onto more modern architectures, including the cloud.

Make Technologies brings application modernization software and services that reduce the cost, risk and time required to re-engineer applications, helping companies modernize their applications portfolios so they can reduce legacy infrastructure operating costs. These applications run most effectively on open, standardized platforms including the cloud.

A great set of solutions to let organizations looking to really get their older apps into a modern execution and device environment. Exciting times for the Dell team supporting these customers.

This very much reminds me of 14-15 years ago and a whole slew of projects where we were trying to drive similar modernization into applications. IBM Network Station was about to be launched; we had a useful first release of the CICS Transcation Gateway and their was a great start at integrating Java with COBOL based applications and some fledgling work on extending the COBOL language to support object oriented principles. My poster session at the IBM Academy of Technology was on legacy modernization. In those days it was obvious that customers needed tools to help them get from where they’d been to where they would be going.

Enough never really got there, the financial case wasn’t often enough. However, given the performance, scalability and reliability of today’s x86/x64 systems, the lack of progress and demand for change have passed compelling, it’s essential.

About & Contact

I'm Mark Cathcart, formally a Senior Distinguished Engineer, in Dells Software Group; before that Director of Systems Engineering in the Enterprise Solutions Group at Dell. Prior to that, I was IBM Distinguished Engineer and member of the IBM Academy of Technology. I am a Fellow of the British Computer Society (bsc.org) I'm an information technology optimist.

I was a member of the Linux Foundation Core Infrastructure Initiative Steering committee. Read more about it here.